Pattern Alterations for Costumes

While not every costume or garment that you're creating for your costume has to start with a pattern. It can be a great idea to have that blueprint that map to start from, to get you going on the basic shapes of your pattern. You can buy patterns in a lot of different places. Um, Etsy is a great place to look for costume patterns. You can find a lot of the smaller pattern companies represented there.

Um You can even just do a search, um, just a whole internet search for your type of pattern that, that you're looking for. Um, either you know, your specific characters, costume pattern or just a more generic um, genre of costume like search medieval dress pattern or princess dress pattern in your search bar and see what turns up in your search engine for um, patterns that are for sale. If you are going for a uh pattern, that is sort of a modern history pattern. It doesn't need to be a uh costume pattern. It can just be sort of a regular garment pattern.

So if you're going for like a fifties or sixties, look, don't necessarily restrain yourself to costume patterns, you can just get these vintage patterns for the garments. Now, if you can't find patterns that are exactly what you're looking for, you wanna get as close as you can and then do some tweaks to the pattern on your own. But when you're getting as close as you can, there are some things that you wanna prioritize in a pattern over others just because some alterations are easier than others. So when you're looking for a pattern, the silhouette doesn't matter. All that much side scenes are really easy to bring in and out.

Um If a pattern that you find is too long or too short, that doesn't matter length is another really easy thing to change on a pattern. Sleeve length is really easy to change. Even the neck line to some extent is pretty easy to change if you find a pattern that um is pretty close, but it's, you know, a crew neck and you need a, a deeper scoop, that's a really easy line to change on the pattern. Um You do want to prioritize the type of closure on your pattern. So if you need a button down the front pattern, look for a button down the front pattern, you can change a center back zip to a front button down.

It's just a little bit harder and it will just take more work. So make things easier for yourself and get the type of closure. Um As you're looking for for your style, you wanna prioritize the uh the way the sleeve is set in. So if you're looking for a Raglan sleeve pattern or a baseball sleeve, which is where the way the sleeve um connects to the bodice, the sea line goes up into the neckline, get your Raglan sleeve pattern. Again, you can change a s sleeve to Raglan sleeve, but it's just a little bit more work.

So try and get your sleeve type correct if you need a um you know, a Dolman sleeve uh or a drop shoulder, a dolmen or a bat wing sleeve, which is where it's all one piece and you have a lot of fabric here, search up that specific type of sleeve, but some of the other things that I mentioned are really easy to alter on your pattern once you get as close as you can. So one of the alterations we're going to look at is to the type of sleeve and a lot of sleeve type alterations are pretty easy to do as well. So we're going to look at how to take a sleeve from a regular type of sleeve to a pop sleeve. So before you make any changes to your pattern, I always recommend making a copy. So if you are, you know, cutting up your pattern and you screw up real bad, you wanna be able to go back and start again.

So you want to preserve the original and you can do that by tracing off a copy and the type of paper that I mentioned before is good for this. And again, there'll be a link in the bonus materials. So this is uh kind of see through. So it's like tracing paper. So I just put my paper over my pattern and I traced the line for the size I needed.

I transferred the markings that I needed, transferred the green line. And then this is the pattern that I'm going to do all of my changes to. So for a puff sleeve, you can add the puff the volume to your sleeve, either at the shoulder seam line where the sleeve sets into the bodice or you can add the puff at the lower portion of the sleeve or you can do both and it's just a little bit of a different alteration. For this example, we are going to add volume to both the top and the bottom of the sleeve. So to start, you want to have an idea of how much volume you want to add, you know, you can add just a little bit, you can add a lot and the more you space out this pattern, the more fabric is going to be gathered back up into the sleeve and the more volume you will get.

So I like to start in the center and you don't wanna add your volume all in one spot, you wanna kind of spread it out. So I'm going to start right at the center and I have a mark here at the top. That's my mark for, um, aligning that sleeve with the shoulder seam of the garment that's going to be set into. So I'm gonna start there and then I'm going to go every two inches. I'm going to make a line.

So I'm going to do two lines on each side of center and I don't want to go past my notches here. So I have my front notch here and my back notch here. And that is for matching for setting that sleeve into the bodice. I don't want the placement of those notches to change. So I'm gonna leave those and you don't really need extra volume under the arm.

Anyway, we're adding our volume to the top. So we're gonna go two inches over and then we're going to use our paper scissors and we're going to slash this pattern. And you can see I've already added a horizontal line and that was not part of the original pattern. I added that as a way point for when we're putting our puzzle pieces of this pattern back together. I want to make sure everything stays straight.

So I've added a horizontal line and I'm just going to slash on the lines that I've drawn. And if we were only adding volume to the lower portion of the sleeve, we would cut up to but not through the seam line there and we would open up our pattern like this and leave this edge alone, but we want to add our volume up here as well. So we're going to slash all the way through. And same thing for if we were adding volume only at the top and not the bottom, we would slash through and leave a little paper hinge at the bottom and these cuts, they don't have to be super precise. We're just finding places to open up our pattern to add more volume, add more fabric and you wanna have an extra piece of pattern paper to reassemble these sleep pieces onto.

So I'm going to bring this piece in and I have a line already drawn across my new paper as well to line up and match that line that I had on my sleeve pattern. So we're going to start with one of our sections here. Now, the amount that you spread these out is up to you, like I said. So starting with one piece, I'm going to spread my pieces an inch and a half. So I can actually see my grid underneath my paper.

So I'm gonna go an inch and a half and I'm lining up the line that I drew on these pattern pieces with this line on the paper behind it, tape those down another inch and a half over. It helps to have a tape dispenser that can just sit and you can just pull tape off of. And when you're doing alterations to a pattern, if you're not quite sure how much volume to add, you can try it on one, you know, try the alteration on your sleep pattern and cut a tester. They call that a Muslim that you can use whatever fabric. It's a good idea to try to use the fabric that you're going to be using for your costume or a similar weight of fabric so that you can tell how the fabric will react to all this extra volume.

And if that's the look that you're going for, you'll be able to tell if you want to add more or less volume. So I've got my pieces all taped down. It's all even with my line. So we have all of this extra volume. Now, our edges of our pattern here are not connected because we've added all this space.

So we want to connect these lines now because we have a curve up here. You could take a French curve ruler if you have it and try to, you know, get the curve. But I find you can also just sort of eyeball it. So we're going to go kind of from the top and we want to connect it into this point down here. So if you have to kind of split the difference in some places, we just want to have a nice even curve along this upper edge.

So there's my new upper edge curve and down here at the lower edge of the, the sleeve, you're gonna do the same thing. And because it's not quite as curvy, I'm using my ruler to connect those points. Ok? But you can also kind of eyeball that and sketch that in. So there are the cutting lines of your new pattern, your puff sleeve pattern piece.

Now, I like to trace this off onto a clean sheet. So it's a little easier to use. So that's what that is going to end up looking like. And you wanna transfer your marks. So this mark at the center, I kind of cut apart because like we cut right through it.

So the actual mark is going to be in the center of this open space. So that's going to be our new center point. And these two marks were for easing the sleeve cap in. We were going to originally based from here to here so that you could pull up on that thread and set that in. But we have a lot more ease, a lot more fabric.

We're going to be easing into the sleeve now. So we are going to have new ease marks and that's going to go from where the volume, where it started from, where we added volume. So it's going to be right here to over here. So those are going to be the new points. Where are we based.

So I've got those marks transferred onto my new pattern piece So we'll base from there to there and then pull up on the basting threads to gather all of this volume up so that it will fit in to the arm's eye of the bodice that you're setting it into. And the same thing down here, I've marked on the lower edge where our volume started. So you're going to put a basting line in there as well from there to there and pull up on that thread to gather this lower edge up until it is the size that you want it to be for your arm. And then you want to add something to the lower edge here to hold those gathers in place. So sleeve alterations like this are fairly easy to do.

If you want to take a sleeve and add volume um at the wrist to make it a bell sleeve, you can search up tutorials on how to do that as well. Um, a bishop sleeve is kind of the same puff sleeve alteration, but in a long sleeve version, it's really pretty type of sleeve. So you can take, you know, the alteration for the style that you need. And um you can search up a specific tutorial on that since all costumes and needs will be different depending on where you're starting from. The next alteration that I wanted to, to look at is how to add a seam line.

And this technique you can use anywhere on a garment, whether it's a vertical, horizontal diagonal, whether it's a curved seam, an angled seam, you can do this anywhere. And like I mentioned before, it's great for separating the pattern into, into different pieces so that you can cut one piece in a different color or a different fabric altogether and add some cool details to your costume. So for this one, I've got my upper portion of my bodice piece and let's do a seam on the center here. So let's just do a two inch strip from the center. And like I said, your seam doesn't have to be straight, it doesn't have to be, you know, straight with the brain line.

You could make a seam right here. You can make a seam line right here depending on where you needed it to add whatever trim or detail you were going for. So, if I want my seam right here, I'm going to just cut along that line and this is going to be a new seam line on my garment. So we're going to sew right there what we need because it's a new seam. We need seam allowances.

So I'm going to cut a strip of some extra pattern paper. We're going to add that to this new edge. Now, you're going to add a seam allowance to this and you want to add uh whatever seam allowance the pattern calls for to stay consistent. Normally that's 5/8 of an inch. I'm just going to add half inch here because this is a pattern that I drew myself.

And when I make patterns, I always use half inch seam allowances just because it's easy for math. So I have my new seam allowance. I'm going to connect at the lower edge and up here because we have a curve here. I'm just kind of going to go, you can either follow the curve somewhat or you can kind of go straight out because this is a curve. I want the seam allowance to kind of be able to be hidden when we sell this together.

So I'm going to just sort of follow that curve and then we're going to cut this out along our new cut line. So that's your new seam allowance and you're going to do the same thing on that side of the seam, add another seam allowance there. So that once you cut these out in whatever fabrics you choose, you can marry those together, sew that back together and then you'll have your full bodice to then move forward with the pattern and create the whole garment.